Generally ‘online marketing of books’ denotes utilizing the enormous power of internet to reach a bigger and highly educated clientele who uses the net to source all sorts of information and goods. Ajay Sharma of Prism Education, and Bernice Maria Paolozzi, developer of iPositiveNow present vast perspectives of its horizon.

As per Ajay Sharma, considering over ‘online marketing of books’, anyone interested in book publishing frequently poses three  questions: is online marketing of books necessary; what are its advantages; and how it can be performed?

Those who are already engaged in marketing of books in the traditional manner (publisher > distributor > retailer) are so engrossed in running their trade. However, it is a proven model of distributing books and making money but consumes a lot time and energy, causing the need to opt newer options which can not only ensure the saving of time and money but also enable to reach new buyers in a big way. Also, the changing behaviour of the targeted people to access information as well as advertisement tends to think beyond the traditional method of book marketing. The best example in today’s scenario is of Naukri.com where Sanjeev Bikhchandani took initiative to bring job advertisements on-line effectively rather than traditional channels of classified ads in newspapers, or of PVR changing the way for buying tickets of cinema (at least in metro cities today).

The advantages of marketing books online are many. It helps you to reach those book buyers who by default have to be educated and are so progressive and open to adopt new ideas (new books ) faster. Living a very targeted and focused life, the young generation wants to squeeze the best out of their limited time and so is increasingly demanding the initial information on any product or concept in easily and readily available form. They enjoy the freedom that internet provides them in searching new products and ideas. Along with the quality of content, the success of a book primarily dependents on how effectively you convey that quality to the buyers. If you can give the prospective book buyer the idea of quality of the content online, they won’t mind ordering it online also. The development of new secure online payment options and faster parcel deliveries will help you in converting the marketing into the sales.

Search engine optimization (SEO):

Search engine marketing (SEM):

Online partnerships:

Affiliate marketing:

Web 2.0 strategies:

Display marketing:

E-mail marketing:

Mobile marketing:

More tools will become available as more innovative applications are developed and on-line connectivity for everyone becomes readily available and the net is used in more different and innovative ways. This point can be better understood in the context of the penetration of mobile phones today. More services and features are available on mobile phones today than when they were launched.

Ultimately, one can go back in the past and visualize the time when the first commercially viable aircraft for intercontinental travel became a reality. The only other means for this kind of travel were ships and we know what select people made at that time, also think about the time when the Hindus were forbidden to even cross the seas and we know what options we made and where we are today. One of the industries where India stands as the leader is the computer software industry, where internet is increasingly becoming the hub around while it revolves, and if we wish, we can ignore it at our own peril.

While as per Bernice Maria Paolozzi, marketing has two goals: firstly, it lets people know availability of your products, and secondly, it makes people want to buy your product. Traditional offline promotion through business cards, stationary, promotional gifts, print, audio and video, advertising, catalogue, magnetic car panels and T-shirts, etc was the method for the time when the internet was not publicly available and the main point of a business plan was the marketing costs. Today, with the power, reach, popularity and growing nature of the internet, there are hundreds of methods to market, promote and increase sales of your book online… for free.

Relying on traditional offline marketing to promote a book in an overcrowded market is a waste of money. It feels like the right option to many first-time publishers to take the easy option and just pay for an ad or a mailing. After all, it feels serious, giving money to promote your book and it fits nicely into a business plan. But clearly, it’s not always possible to check the impact of advertising on sales, particularly if you actively market the book through many different ways. The internet gives the power to build exposure, list your book, share your writing, and get better search engine placement – all of which helps  market your writing and promote your books online.

It is very important that all online marketing is going to one place – your website – which should be a content driven website. There are hundreds of sites to which you can link to show thousands of people, but that serves no purpose if they are being directed to many different channels. Directing people back to one source – your website – will, in a structured manner attract thousands of people a day and send thousands of shoppers a month to Amazon or to their local retail store to request the book. The biggest sales channel for books can be regular book stores with sales coming from online book promotion, or word-of-mouth from website sales.

About the most important thing you can do is to title your page correctly for the main idea or subject that you’re addressing. Of course there are a lot of search engines out there, but most people use one of the big three: Google, Yahoo or MSN. Most other search engines use a mixture of advertisements, disguised as search listings, and results from one of the big three.

There are two ways to promote your books’ website link: (a) make sure a link to your page appears on a site which is crawled by the search engine (Search Engine Optimization); and (b) submit it yourself.

Search engine optimization:

With the position your site shows up in the search engine, results will change how many visitors are shown your site from the search engine. Your ranking for a particular key word or key phrase is based on a technical method based on the text on your page, the number of links to your page, and the content of those links into your page. In order to bring people to your site it makes a massive difference where your page ranks in search results. People are far more likely to follow the first returned link, than the second or third, let alone the 100th. Your goal then should be to have a site which appears in the top ten listing for popular search terms related to the topic/content of your book.

The key is to understand how search engines operate and planning ahead when you design your site. When designing a web page with search engines optimization in mind, it is very important to know what people are searching for, rather than just guessing. You will probably be quite surprised to see what people type into a search engine. There are two ways to do this kind of research for free. One is through the Yahoo keyword suggestion tool, which currently is available to the public at http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/. Another is by creating a free Google ad words account at http://adwords.google.com/select/.

The most important factor in Google search results is a method called Page Rank. This method assigns a value to every page on the web, a value of 0 to 10, which shows sites by importance in calculating search engine results.

Manual submission:

Also, there are multiple ways to market and promote your book online to that global audience through manual submission without any costs.

There are over forty free book listing sites that you can use for book marketing and book promotion purposes. Forums are one of the best ways to market your writings and books. They are also great for contacting with other writers and authors, as well as for gaining information and learning strategies for what others are doing. Writing forums also give back links to your website or blog (via the signature link), and are another great way for boosting your websites rankings in the search engines. There are currently fifteen recommended forums for this purpose. There are also over 100 free websites for authors and writers to promote/market their books and writings online. Over 200 web directories are essential if you plan on being indexed and placed high within search engines. Giving articles to ‘article directory’ sites is one of the fastest, easiest, and most reliable methods of gaining back links to boost your websites page rank in the search engines. There are over 200 of these sites to boost the page rank of your website. Press releases on the book can be issued to 19 free press release sites for book marketing and author promotion. Another great way to get some excitement and promotion going for your book is to enter it in competitions for book awards. Winning an award for your book can go a long way in terms of positive excitement about your book. It is also an effective means of promoting and marketing the books. There are over eighty book competitions which can be entered.

All the above gives 654 links to promoting and marketing your book online which are easy, straightforward and free.

All About Book Publishing